How to avoid sounding like an monkey — A few weeks ago a well-respected developer wrote a blog post about something he called the "social graph." A graph, to most people, is a diagram like the one on the right, which plots the value of a stock over time. For 99.99 percent of the people this is what a graph is.

Thank you, Dave Winer — I tried to ignore the term "social graph" when it first started popping up a few weeks ago. For one thing, it sounded like some sort of embarrassing disease; for another, the idea of having to figure out some arcane new Web 2.0 term was depressing.

MediaDefender's Decoy Effectiveness on BitTorrent Sites — MediaDefender determines the effectiveness of their spoofs and decoys by analyzing the top search results for the file in question, mostly movies and music albums. If 2 out of 10 top search results are fake files spread by them …

Symantec issues bogus warning of full-scale Internet meltdown — False alarm result of 'product testing,' says company an hour later — Symantec Corp.'s early warning system gave its enterprise customers a brief scare late Friday when it erroneously sent an alert that said an Internet-crippling attack was in progress.

Google Could Trip Over the Mortgage Mess — IS GOOGLE TRULY IMMUNE TO THE SUBPRIME-MORTGAGE MORASS? — Ever since Google (ticker: GOOG) whiffed on its second-quarter earnings, fans and critics alike have been entertaining this critical question. — Critics such as Barron's Roundtable …

Google Very Well Could Achieve Social Network Domination — Today, TechCrunch reports on some secret meeting where Google has something "really really big" in the works to take Facebook on head to head. Sounds kinda sneaky and strange (and a little Dr. Evil) but this is Silicon Valley.

Facebook's Impact on the Widget Economy — Last night I attended a technology event, Refresh DC. Refresh DC provides local companies with the opportunity to speak for an hour about a topic of their choice. Last night's event was sponsored by Clearspring and the topic of discussion was widgets.

The XP alternative for Vista PCs — update While Microsoft is still pushing Vista hard, the company is quietly allowing PC makers to offer a "downgrade" option to buyers that get machines with the new operating system but want to switch to Windows XP. — The program applies …

Micro-USB Mobile Phone Charging Standard Announced — Relief from the tangled mess that is the cell phone charger market today is finally in sight — Last week a group of power players in the mobile phone manufacturing industry gathered to discuss the future of phone charging and data exchange.

Sony PSP Vaults Past Nintendo DS in Japan — This is why Sony may yet rule the console-verse in spite of all its missteps and bungled first-gen games and cynical press. Because pretty much out of the blue, a game like Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII can come along in the right market (Japan) …

Google to Envelope All Knowledge on November 5th, 2007 — Michael Arrington has convinced several high level sources to disclose discussion at a top secret Google meeting where the company discussed plans to release on November 5th a new set of APIs. Those APIs will make access to the data …

Know Your Rights: How does fair use work? — Know Your Rights is Engadget's new technology law series, written by our own totally punk copyright attorney Nilay Patel. In it we'll try to answer some fundamental tech-law questions to help you stay out of trouble in this brave new world.

Techmeme and Google Shared Stuff: WTF? — Update: — It seems to be gone from Techmeme now — but still. Very weird. — Original post: — Tony Hung at Deep Jive Interests has mentioned this too, but I'm not sure whether the problem is Techmeme's or something that has gone squirrely with Google's Shared Reader.